 I’ve
been thinking about volunteering. I have been thinking about the act of
volunteering and why we do it. These thoughts have been focussed on my
own group of acquaintances involved with canal and canal boat
restoration but they can equally apply to the millions that give their
time energy and money to any other good cause close to their heart.
Why do we do it? We undoubtedly get some fun and
satisfaction along the way but underlying these personal benefits is the
understanding that if we didn’t do it, it probably wouldn’t get done,
and the world would be a poorer place. In the canal world we try to
promote and preserve some fundamentally important objects and attitudes
to work and life which we think should be important to everybody. It is
not national policy so we volunteer to help promote those ideas by
digging or talking, learning to build boats or learning to teach. Very
often (and very boringly) it is often simply raising money to push
professional people into doing what they ought to be doing anyway.
Generally speaking people volunteer to do something
different, something worthwhile but different to what they do for a
living or what burns up the rest of their life. But after the first
satisfying day working with like-minded people one feels less lonely,
more part of a group, and more useful. Naturally, as soon as you are
part of a team a responsibility to that team develops and the natural
tendency is to volunteer one’s existing talents and skills into the job
instead of learning new ones. Sensible, of course, in achieving results
but less personally enlarging. Suddenly you are doing even more of what
you joined to get away from in the first place. Shucks, how did that
happen? But nice people and the group enthusiasm carry you along
although it is sometimes hard to preserve the original core of well
meaning philosophy (or even remember it) as yet another committee
meeting looms. Progressively there is that rankling feeling that They
ought to be doing what we’re doing for free, that a truly sensible
education/preservation/restoration policy should be doing what we are
doing, professionally, with fully trained experts.
Canal restoration and preservation societies are all
facing an age problem – members getting older or dying off without
generating enough younger blood replacements. It is the downside of
success in some ways for the truly political battles have been won and
there is little left to inspire the youthful radical with canal fervour.
In the 1950s and 60s there seemed to be a battle to be fought, a truly
fire-in-the-belly campaign to save the canals for everyone, a classless
egalitarianism that had echoes of the mass trespass movements of the
1930s. Ramshackle cruisers boated alongside the last of the working
boats whilst barely converted old narrow boats took thousands of young
people on camping trips that were exploratory and challenging. They have
gone now because the canals are open and safe. However, some of that
modern victory seems a little hollow – a time of marinas and glossy
expensive steel cruisers, of middle class retirement homes and hire
boats. We have a thriving holiday and leisure industry, but one with
little respect for the history or intrinsic values that fired the
enthusiast’s imagination in the mid-twentieth century, and still
precious little canal cargo carrying to save the planet.
What is to be done? We could simply hope that our
societies will reach an equilibrium with new members joining at the same
rate that the old ones die off, but it is likely to be a rather dull
retirement-age club. Without fervour, without a vital future policy,
people will only join when they feel they can afford the time and the
money to take part. Or we can roll over and let it fade away, accept
that the general public’s apathy and indifference is indeed right, that
in history, in the natural evolution of society the waterways cause has
been won, and lost. Or we can re-examine our intentions and original
guiding principles and try again, with experience and hindsight. The
environment still needs water transport and fully rounded humans need
history and aesthetic quality in their lives and I still think canals
and old boats can teach all of that in a very condensed form. So in my
case it is back to Saturn, an old restored narrow boat now re-launched
into a new career as an educational tool and a working museum exhibit,
and back to an extraordinarily vital team of friends voluteering huge
mounts of time and energy to keeping those principles alive.
But finally, after all the organisation and forward
planning, loading the car the previous evening, getting up early,
fighting the rush hour traffic, opening the boat and polishing the brass
–the kids arrive. We divide them into smaller groups so they can all get
a turn at visiting the cabin and us volunteers launch into our scripts
and activities. The children listen politely whilst you present them
with what you think are the important bits of information but their eyes
rove inquisitively elsewhere. Then the questions begin and the game of
intellectual tennis begins, batting back the easy ones but often getting
floored by the unexpected. Ten minutes or a quarter of an hour, then
change groups and start again. A full morning of that and there is no
doubt why we’re doing it, a full day and there’s no energy left to even
think about it. I just hope there was a future transport minister or
arts minister amongst them.
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